Pike leads epic ‘Wheel of Time’
Money is no object as streaming services compete for holiday viewers. Amazon has thrown considerable resources into making the eight-episode adaptation of “The Wheel of Time,” the sprawling fantasy series by Robert Jordan.
Rosamund Pike leads a massive cast and is required to recite gobs of dialogue about destiny and fate and other portentous whatnot. Apparently, somebody may or may not be the reincarnation of a mythic hero sent to either save or destroy the world. Help yourself.
› Another impressive production, “The Great” returns to Hulu for a second season. Elle Fanning stars as Russia’s Catherine the Great. As the season begins, she’s knee-deep in an attempted coup against her depraved and incompetent husband, Peter (Nicholas Hoult).
Gillian Anderson (“The X-Files,” “The Fall,” “The Crown”) joins the cast, as Catherine’s mother.
All historical dramas are interpretations of events made palatable (and, at times, entertaining) for contemporary audiences. No educated person assumes that Julius Caesar spoke in the iambic pentameter Shakespeare employed in “Julius Caesar.”
“The Great” plays historical Russian melodrama as a glib and callous farce. Peter behaves like some coked-up Wall Street monster right out of “Succession.” Squalid historical conditions are played for laughs. When the queen offers a dainty crumpet to a wounded soldier, she discovers he has no hands. Without missing a beat, she plops it into his mouth. It’s a scene more appropriate to, but not quite funny enough for, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” The shallow cynicism of “The Great” says a lot more about our era than Catherine’s.
› Apple TV+ launches the latest adaptation of “Harriet the Spy,” based on Louise Fitzhugh’s beloved 1964 children’s book. Last seen playing Monica Lewinsky in “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” Beanie Feldstein voices Harriet and Jane Lynch speaks for her beloved mentor and nanny.
Published at a time when pop culture, and particularly television, revolved around suburban life, “Harriet” was a tale of an eccentric city kid whose imagination and inquisitive nature lead her to what a few concerned contemporary critics described as “disagreeable situations.”
The setting of this new “Harriet” seems oddly timeless. The animation style doesn’t so much evoke the 1960s as the revival of that era’s cartoons in the 1990s and early 2000s. The soundtrack music also sounds generically post-punk. But when Harriet wants to amuse herself, she whips out a transistor radio, a device familiar to the current audience’s grandparents.
The cover of the first edition of “Harriet” showed a serious little girl walking past a shabby storefront on the ground floor of a tenement complete with broken windows. Like the original, the animated “Harriet” takes place on the Upper East Side. But a half-century of physical and cultural gentrification has photoshopped all the “disagreeable” buildings from her midst.